Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 October 2020
We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, if you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
—Aide to George W. Bush, quoted by Ronald Suskind
Why the Baroque? Why now? As many have argued, the general aesthetic trend of the late twentieth to early twenty-first centuries, often called postmodern, can perhaps more usefully be labeled neobaroque. Is the neobaroque turn of the twentieth century something akin to the neoclassicism of the sixteenth century, or the neo-Gothicism of the nineteenth? Or, on an even more condensed scale, is it similar to the rapid returns of previously dismissed fashion decades, as evidenced by the proliferation in the early years of this century of those beads and bellbottoms associated with flower children and the age of Aquarius?